Twitter has blocked access to a neo-Nazi account at the request of the German government.

While the rest of the world will be able to see them, Germans will not. It is the first time the social networking site has implemented its local censorship policy, which came into force in January.

It allows it to block content in specific countries if tweets violate local laws. In Germany you are not allowed to push neo-nazi material on account of a bad experience the nation had when it allowed that sort of thing. Announcing the decision, Twitter's general counsel Alex Macgillivray said: "Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly and transparently."

The site belonged to the organisation Besseres Hannover, (Better Hannover), a right-wing extremist group from Lower Saxony. The group has been officially disbanded, its assets are seized and all its accounts in social networks have to be closed immediately. Twitter said that it works with anti-Nazi organisations and would encourage anyone who finds content like this to report it to Facebook.

Members of the group have been charged with inciting racial hatred and creating a criminal organisation. It is also accused of issuing threats against immigrants and distributing racist pamphlets at schools in Lower Saxony.Lately it sent a threatening video to the state's social affairs minister Aygul Ozkan, a German-born conservative politician whose family comes from Turkey.

Google, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook and other Internet companies are joining forces and forming a lobbying group called The Internet Association. The group opened for business today and aims to tackle regulatory and political issues in Washington, D.C.

The group's president Michael Beckerman, former advisor to Fred Upton, the chairman of the US House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee, said that the group will lobby on issues such as allocation of visas for engineers and matters of privacy and piracy. Other members include Expedia, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide, Yahoo! and Zynga.

Internet companies have not tried to pool their resources before to influence regulations pertaining to revenue repatriation, cyber security, and sales tax. As a result they usually get stomped on by the Telcos.

Beckerman said that the Internet's decentralised and open systems have created unprecedented entrepreneurialism. "Policymakers must understand that the preservation of that freedom is essential to the vitality of the Internet itself and the resulting economic prosperity," he said.

Google and Facebook are among the companies that have been steadily ramping up spending on lobbying the federal government.

Big Content is using piracy take-downs on Google to spike bad reviews.

According to the Verge, British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) group listed a series of pages that it wanted removed from Google Search. Three of the requests pointed instead to reviews of Drake's album Take Care, one by The A.V. Club and one by About.com writer Henry Adaso.

Adaso wants to know how his review could be removed after a DMCA complaint. He thinks that it can only be because comments on both his 50-word article and that of The A.V. Club contain links to an extremely negative review and that Universal was trying to scrub mentions of it from the web.

The Verge thinks that this might have been a mistake but it doesn't reflect well on BPI or Universal, who clearly didn't look through their requests very closely. But it also shows an alarming trend from Google which says it plans to downrank sites that get too many take-down requests.

It is possible that some sites could effectively be kicked off the web if Big Content makes another mistake or, worse, starts doing it deliberately.

The German Federation of Consumer Organizations has threatened Blizzard with legal action unless the company highlights the requirement for constant internet connection on Diablo III packaging.

Strangely enough, even though some companies tried similar methods in the past, and quite expectedly stirred a whole lot of trouble, Blizzard still decided to run with it. Now, it is given until July 27, 2012, to do as the group asks or face legal action.

In related news, the company has been fined in South Korea over not refunding customers for the Error 37, which rendered the game unplayable due to sheer number of players and resulting server errors. Thankfully, the fine is £4,500, so we're talking pocket money for the company.

Well, it's not the victory many players hoped for, but will probably be enough to shut everyone up. Besides, those without an internet connection can't complain much to begin with.

It has been reported that 28 year old Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. Sabu, the alleged leader of LulzSec, was actually an FBI informer. Apparently, he was working for FBI for at least six months and managed to help FBI charge five other hackers.

LulzSec is an offshoot of Anonymous that starred in many attacks throughout 2011. Among its victims are politicians, the US Department of Justice, Visa, Mastercard, Rupert Murdoch’s empire, Stratfor, Irish party Fine Gael, etc.

It turned out that Sabo had been charged with 12 counts and secretly pleaded guilty to the charges on August 15, 2011. Had he been found guilty, he’d face a sentence up to some 124 years in the can. However, Sabo denied it at the time.

FBI’s documents revealed that a snitch called CW was “acting under the direction of the FBI” and helped speed up the leak of a conference call between the FBI and UK’s Serious and Organized Crime Agency. Another document claims that he facilitated the release of emails nicked from Stratfor that are now being published by Wikileaks, all while under the FBI’s thumb. Naturally this gives way to many other questions.

FBI seems to be quite happy about it, as it claims that it chopped off the organization’s head. On the other hand, security firms warn that this could trigger yet another wave of attacks by angered hackers. We however can’t stop thinking how the story is strangely reminiscent of 1984, as opposed to the V for Vendetta scenario romantically envisioned by some.

It is said that the act is part of Anonymous’ pro-Occupy Wall Street movement. The information contains Moynihan’s phone, address, financial details as well as the number of lawsuits he is in.

We’re not sure how that is supposed to help anyone’s cause other than encourage the overzealous protesters to give him a knock on the door. On the other hand, Moynihan will at least have a scare, which is pure vacation compared to what us mortals and commoners go through on daily basis, not least when dealing with banks.

This is not the first time though, as the group did the same with personal information of CitiGroup CEO Vikram S. Pandit, Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe and others. Furthermore, Anonymous is also held responsible for the leaked data from International Association of Chiefs of Police, Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association and two law enforcement organizations from Alabama.

South Korean police have locked up five people who teamed up with North Korean hackers to steal millions of dollars in points from online gaming sites.

Another nine people have been released while more inquires are made. All have been charged that they worked with North Koreans to hack gaming sites in the South.

The gang members worked in China and shared profits after they sold programs that allowed users to rack up points without actual play, police said. The points were later exchanged for cash through sites where players trade items to be used for their avatars. The police said the gang made about $6m (£3.7m) over the last year and a half. North Korean hackers were asked to join the alleged scheme because they were good at their jobs and could skirt national legal boundaries.

The Korea Computer Centre, Pyongyang's IT research venture, was the main culprit. Set up in 1990, the centre has 1,200 experts developing computer software and hardware for North Korea.

The National Intelligence Service, South Korea's spy agency, was heavily involved in the investigation, the police said. Investigators think that the hackers' so-called "auto programs" also piggy backed North Korean cyberattacks.

Antisec, the hacking outfit which emerged from a merger between Lulzsec and Anonimous, has been revealing hacked data from the Anguilla, Brazil, and Zimbabwe governments.

AntiSec is a hybrid of Anonymous and LulzSec. Its goal appears to target government security amd dumping batches of information onto MediaFire.

Hackers dumped data from the Anguilla Government, then the Brazilians, then Zimbabwe and Australia. There is a bit of data from US companies. It will be torrented later today with more data from US companies and promised surprises.

The information is hardly diplomatic cables with an impact like Wikileaks. There are a few passwords ripped from Brazillian servers, the SQL-Dump of all Zimbabwe servers starting with the small userbase of Zimbabwe. The hacktivists claim they are trying to find out who actually likes Robert Mugabe.

The outfit claims that it will not be as funny as Lulzsec, but it would “sail in the same spirit”. In other words will sale up the nasal passages of authority and block the sinuses of governments who do not have enough security.

There had been talk of an alliance between Lolzsec and Anonymous for some time. Killing of Lolzsec and setting up a new structure might have been needed as rival hackers started to get close to exposing members.

A few weeks after the US announced that hacking its servers could be seen as a declaration of war, a European group of hackers took out the US Senate computer server.

LulzSec, a hacker activist group made up of former members of the hacker organization Anonymous, said it had also broken into the networks of Bethesda Softworks and released sign-ons and passwords of users of a pornography website.

The hack follows more than two weeks of cyber attacks by the group, which claims PBS, the television network Fox, and the Atlanta chapter of a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation affiliate called InfraGuard for its scalps. On their webpage the hackers said that they didn't like the U.S. government very much.

Martina Bradford, deputy sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate, said the hackers did not gain access into the Senate computer network and was only able to read and determine the directory structure of the file placed on senate.gov. However the Senate data, known as a configuration file, could be used by other hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the Senate network and obtain confidential information from U.S. Lawmakers.